It’s all very well to relish our reputation as butchers, but there are
times when a negative reception is genuinely damaging. It’s not
simply a matter of closing shows (following near-universal panning, The Fantasticks closed before our
reviews could be reprinted). In 1997, when I was playing at
performing comedy on the Edinburgh Fringe, I was persuaded to do a spot
at the notorious Late & Live... but even before I knew I’d be doing
it (and that’s no exaggeration), word had been leaked out and comedian
Dylan Moran had gathered a posse of comedians all keen to give a critic
the same short shrift as they felt we gave them. The fact that I
myself had never written a word against them was irrelevant; it was a
matter of what I was. The non-stop baying for my blood made that
the most menacing night of my life, and I grew up in Belfast in the
1970s.

Unsympathetic

But there is an a possible example far closer to hand. As some
reviews – those written with longer lead times – note, the artist and
poseur Sebastian Horsley was found dead on the afternoon following the
opening night of Dandy In The
Underworld, Tim Fountain’s stage adaptation of Horsley’s
autobiography. Word has it that he had been agonised and
horrified, not by what Tim had done with the material, but by the
unsympathetic way in which he was coming over as a character; by most
accounts, Horsley was much more considerate and solicitous than his
barbed epigrams suggest. An inquest has not yet been held into
his death, which appears to have been from a drug overdose.

It’s difficult to write about Horsley’s death in this way without
seeming to fuel the rumours and generally appearing ghoulish, but… oh,
look, even that “but” looks suspicious. Various plays reviewed in
this issue deal with or touch upon a Dunblane-type school massacre, the
Lockerbie plane bombing and even Jack the Ripper, but when something so
grievous touches a production directly, we are reminded that theatre is
only ever a simulacrum of real events; if there is even a chance that
it may have become part of those events themselves, we feel more
unsettled than we would be by the grimmest drama onstage.

Reality

As T.S Eliot wrote, “Humankind cannot bear too much reality.” The
Tricycle’s Women, Power &
Politics season corroborates that view, in more ways than it
perhaps intended to. Fiona Mountford notes in her review a remark
by former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith about “a Parliament in which more
MPs are called John than are women”. It is, in my opinion, the
most powerful single line in the entire collection of plays and
supporting material. It was even true when Harriet Harman
originally said it following her arrival at Westminster after a
by-election victory in 1982.

In the current House of Commons, however, women MPs outnumber Johns,
Jons and Jonathans by more than five to one. (I have to admit
that I became fleetingly obsessed with the figures behind this claim,
spending some time totting up the numbers from Wikipedia’s lists of MPs
in recent parliaments; I can report that the turning point came in
1992, when the 1987 parliament’s slight majority of Johns became a
roughly two-to-one preponderance of women.) Now, it is without
doubt a matter at the very least worthy of further examination that
Britain can muster a mere 22% of MPs who share the same sex as 51.4% of
the population; but surely there are enough real reasons for deploring
this state of affairs without having to fabricate new ones or attempt
to perpetuate obsolete ones.